Lazarus, Reborn Thrice
by Cassandra or Bonkers pehaps
Summary: Like Lazarus she rose, once, twice, thrice from the graves they made for her. Bones/Brennan-centric, spoilers for season 1-4 I guess, though not majorly - one episode and two anecdotes.     What was it like, buried, trapped those three times?
1. Chapter 1

**I.**

The first time she finds herself trapped in her own grave she is sixteen. The foster family she is living with is much worse than the three previous ones, but by now, like the boy who cried wolf, she finds her complaints to the social worker falling on deaf ears. There are so many rules, so many unspoken cues that Temperance cannot see – it makes her head spin. It makes her a nervous, jumpy, clumsy thing. So badly, unfortunately clumsy.

They warn her. They tell her quite clearly all the things she dare not do, from the largest to the small: don't lock your door, do the sweeping, the washing, don't backtalk, never come home late, don't pick up the phone, don't make noise, don't drop, crack, break anything and when you leave a room make sure there's not a trace of your presence there left behind. They give her fair warning, and she tries, but that night she's upset. Her hands shake, and the dishes are covered with soap and the water, it steams, it scalds her skin and she tries, she cannot help it, a dish slips through her fingers. It falls, slow motion-like to the ground, hits the linoleum tiles edge first, cracks, bursts, scatters across the floor. And Temperance Brennen freezes, tries to think, to react but it is already too late. They both come into the kitchen. She whimpers, whispers, begs. She tries to struggle, but he is so much stronger.

Then she is there, inside of the trunk of his car. Her ankles and wrists are tied together with duct tape, and she screams, she writhes but there is so little room to move and it is so dark and it gets her nowhere. She sobs. Falls asleep. Wakes up. Screams, sobs, pounds her hands against the walls of the small space, retches, faints. Time passes. Her stomach growls, aches. Her throat and lips grow parched. She whimpers. There is waiting and more waiting. She is cold. How long as it been? Will they come back, let her out? Time passes. She cannot cry anymore. She thinks of Russ, her parents, she tries to remember their faces, hoping as strongly as she ever has in the last year and a half that they will come back for her. She hopes that they'll find her, save her now when she needs it so badly, one of them, all of them, please.

Time passes. The air feels sticky, thick, she feels like she cannot breath, the smell of her own urine makes her retch again, the time passes on forever, she shivers, she wants to cry but cannot, cannot feel or breath or even move, really and then she knows, in a moment of epiphany as she stares into the blackness, that it is all over. That her parents and brother are never coming back no matter how much she needs them, how much she acts out or cries; she knows that the foster parents are going to let her die in here, that her life will end in this small, dark trunk, that she will never see the sunlight again, or breath fresh air, or read a book. She will die in this too-familiar darkness with her hands and wrists stuck together like an animal and it will be days or even weeks before anyone even notices she is gone. Fascinated by the morbidity of her thoughts, light-headed from dehydration, exhaustion, and lack of oxygen she starts to imagine what will happen to her body after she dies, how it will look in a day, in a week, when someone finally notices the smell. She imagines what will be done with it when they finally pull it out. Will anyone even be _sad? _ She curls into an even tighter ball. She does not think of an afterlife. She is certain there will be nothing, that everything will simply stop. It will stop, she will be gone, and the world will go on just as before, not a bit less of the loss of her. As she loses consciousness, she cannot let go of that thought, of just how little she has to lose as she dies in this goddamn trunk.

Then she wakes up, jostled awake by her foster father's rough grip as he deposits her onto the living room floor. She is foggy-minded, uncertain that this is real, that she is in fact still breathing and seeing something other than the dark. But she is sure of that last thought, of the fact that she should have died but did not and that, perversely, after all that she was no longer terrified. She had accepted that she was going to die alone in that dark trunk, and instead she was here, on the living room floor, tired but blissfully alive. There wasn't a damn thing they could do to make her afraid again. In fact, she was almost overcome with the need to laugh.

She waited, lay there on the floor until they both left the room and then, heedless of repercussions, called the police.


	2. Chapter 2

**II.**

The second time it happens, she is twenty-six. She's in El Salvador at the invitation of a local human rights group, helping identify the remains of death squad victims in the countryside. It is evening, late enough that she should be asleep, or relaxing in bed at the very least, but Temperance is unable to do any of those things. Instead she is still at her work table, studying the remains of the latest victim: a girl, about thirteen years old, barely entered into puberty when she was killed, shot and thrown into a well. Back in the US, at the Jeffersonian, it would have been easy to identify her remains. Records in El Salvador are a more tricky matter, however, and asking questions of the living yields little useful information – the people here are terrified that they will be next if they step just a bit out of line. So she stares at the bones, waiting for them to speak to her, to tell her what she needs to know. You can always rely on the dead, she thinks to herself for what feels like the millionth time.

Then there is a knock, a shout outside the entrance of her tent. It is a man, probably police judging by his uniform. At first Temperance thinks it is one of her guards, that he has come to warn her of some small thing or other, as here officials are prone to do to foreign women traipsing around the darker edges of the country where they do not belong. She is wrong. His tone quickly transforms from merely patronizing to dangerously hostile as she argues with him, refuses to back down, to leave the young girl's death alone. For a moment, she thinks he is going to hit her, shoot her even, but then he backs down, barking out one last threat as he retreats. She lets out a long breath, relieved.

Hours later, just as she is finally preparing to go to sleep, three men burst into her tent. They are armed with guns and before she can even scream or put up a good fight they surround her, overwhelm her. One of the men slides a garrote around her neck and chokes until her knees go weak and then a black bag is thrown over her head.

When she wakes up, Temperance is again in a small, dark, stuffy black space, a tiny room with no windows, a small cellar of some sort she later learns. Her arms are tied behind her back with a rough rope. She struggles, to free her hands, to find an exit, to scream for help, anything. Fear and anger vie for dominance in her skull and she goes with the latter because anything is better than the blind terror, the utter despair she felt just over a decade ago in such similar circumstances. At least this time she can move a bit, walk around a few paces. So she feels it, lets it wash over her, the anger, outrage, indignation. When she cries it is with frustration at her own powerlessness, at the gall of these men who terrorize so many innocent people, who throw little girls into wells and who now hold her captive in this tomb-like room.

She doesn't know how much time passes before he arrives, a tall, well-muscled man dressed in combat fatigues and carrying a Kalashnikov. He yells at her, threatens to murder her like they did the girl, calls her a fool and a whore, and when she tries to spit at him in contempt he smacks her face so hard she spits blood. He smacks her again, chokes her with his bare hands, laughs.

The water they leave her has a gritty taste to it, no doubt the kind that foreigners are always warned not drink, but in this case Temperance has no doubt that water-born pathogens are preferable to a slow, painful death by dehydration so she drinks. She has no idea how much time passes but it seems to go on forever, the waiting. She sleeps a little, but mostly her eyes stay stubbornly open and awake.

The next time, two of them come down. They force her to kneel with her hands behind her head against the wall, execution-style and she starts to hyperventilate when she feels two rifles pointed against the back of her skull, she sobs though tears refuse to form in her eyes, dead, so dead, she is about to be dead, to be nothing, and she, she can't breath, think, can't, and then they pull the triggers, both, click, click, and no bullets come out and they laugh, oh how they laugh as she slumps against the wall in shock and relief. Then he, the man from last time, again tells her just how they will kill her, when they really do it, which they will, eventually, and laughs again, and kicks her, and leaves.

She shakes for hours afterwards. Suddenly it's as if she is sixteen again and all she can think of is her own impending death. This time at least, someone will miss her. Her colleagues at the Jeffersonian, when she doesn't return as scheduled, will try to reach her. When they can't, they will contact the American Embassy in El Salvador, who will work with local law enforcement, who will find very little information indeed on her disappearance. It will maybe make a few headlines, "Promising Young Forensic Anthropologist Disappears" or some such. And besides colleagues, who will miss her? Angela, Angela who had lectured her about how working with skeletons in El Salvador was NOT a vacation and had tried to drag her to Italy instead. Angela who insisted on seeing all the beauty that life had to offer her. This last thought makes her smile. The last time, in that trunk, she knew for certain that no one would really notice or care if she died there. Now, a mere ten years later…she has gained something: a single friend and respect in her field. It was something. She tries not to think too much of the quite precise, clinical details of what would happen to her remains once she was dead. It is hard, given how much knew on the subject

There is a third visit, eventually. The men repeat the false execution, the empty gun (a pistol this time), the threats. Then, a sudden hard thunk to the back of her head. She passes out. She passes and when she wakes up, Temperance is greeted by the sight, the wonderful sight of the night sky. She had likely been thrown out of a car, left at the side of a dirt road several miles away from the village she'd been working in before being kidnapped. She tries to stand. Immediately, the world spins and she vomits, dry heaving really for it'd been days since she'd eaten and there's nothing but a little spittle to throw up.

Concussion, she thinks, feeling at her head in an attempt to assess the seriousness of the injury. She is shaking with relief and anger. Again she'd been sure she was dead and yet somehow, she finds that she is not. Like her foster parents before, the death squad had balked, when push came to shove, at killing a well known American scientist. Temperance is certain that it was only that, her nationality, that had saved her. Anger, anger and indignation, which she clings to, which she swears with, gripped with a sudden need, swears that one day, if she can, when she can, she will get them, get back at the bastards that had hurt and killed so many people with such impunity, who thought they could get anything they wanted through violent intimidation.

She doesn't return to the village, knowing that by now the remains of the girl would be gone and the villagers too terrified to even look at her. Instead Brennan turns in the opposite direction and begins to walk, unsteadily, towards the next town, which if she remembers properly should not be more than a few hours away. She decides not to tell anyone of the incident, not her colleagues and especially not Angela, who would worry, who would tell her she shouldn't go to dangerous places and risk her life like that, who would tell her that she should have learned her lesson and that she should take relaxing vacations like normal people.

Temperance cannot explain why that was impossible, that this only made her more willing, more determined to keep doing what she did, to defy the kind of people who thought they could get away with murder, with rape, with genocide simply because they had guns and brute strength. She cannot explain that she couldn't relax on a beach somewhere, knowing as she knew how much death, how many atrocities, how many disasters there were, knowing that there was so much pain and that she could help. She doesn't want to try explaining why she needs to be doing this, that this was the one thing that was hers, that she could always rely on: bones and death and cold, scientific logic.

No, it is better to tell no one of this, she decides, and keeps walking, trying to ignore the nausea, the bitter bile swilling around in her throat.


	3. Chapter 3

**Thank you, everyone, for reading this, and super big thank you to those who left reviews. I very much appreciate the feedback. If you read and liked the story, a review, even just a very short comment, would be very cool :]**

**III.**

She is thirty-one the third time, the time that she is most literally buried alive. This time she wakes up quite suddenly, her head pounding, a dull pain in the back of her neck. Disorientation is quickly followed by shock, panic, that sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Realization hits, the fact that it is she doesn't know where she is, that it is dark. Her hands thrust out: a car, no, her car, she is in her car. Temperance Brennan turns on the ignition and the light and the radio quickly come to life. Some stupid song she doesn't recognize is playing, obnoxious. The panicky feeling increases as she realizes that save for the one overhead lamp, _there is still no light_. Temperance fumbles with the car door, unable to pull it open -why, why won't it open? When she tries rolling down the window, the answer, the explanation for everything is made suddenly, terribly clear. Dirt, gravel pours into the car and it is all she can do to shut the window again before it covers her. The Gravedigger, he must have…and then a groan from the backseat.

When she turns around, when she sees Hodgins there, she cannot help but feel relief. It's not that she would wish this, this thing, this situation on anyone but the fact that she isn't alone this time…she feels relief. It is short-lived, however: his injury, his confusion, the need to say aloud what she'd so recently realized brings back the panicked breathlessness. Brennan examines his wound, concern growing. Though she is not a medical doctor, her detailed knowledge of the human body, of anatomy and physiology, combined with the first aid and medic training that her extensive travels had made a necessity means that she can diagnose most illnesses and injuries with a high degree of accuracy. And his injury, his symptoms worry her. She hesitates a moment, then tells him her fears, what she believes needs to be done. They agree.

She wants to cry when he tells her how much he loves Angela, when she sees the depth of emotion in his eyes. She doesn't, of course – Temperance has never been keen on crying in front of others, but she resolves to tell Angela this, all of this, if they get out and he doesn't himself, if her friend still doesn't see it, his love. Then she takes a deep breath, concentrating on her hand, on keeping it as steady as it is when she works with her bones, and she makes the incision.

Then Hodgins is unconscious, and she is alone again with her thoughts in the car. Trying to stay calm, logical, Brennan takes stock of her surroundings. It could be worse, she tells herself after a few moments. There is some light, and she is not alone, and they have some time still, and Booth and her team are no doubt looking for them. Booth. Her breath catches. Booth, yes Booth is looking, Booth won't give up. She thinks about her partner, thinks back on all the times so far they have helped each other, saved each other, the time Booth got blown up for her, all of it, and she feels a bit calmer.

This time at least, she knows that someone has not just noticed her disappearance but is without a doubt trying to find her. This time she can actually make a list of the people who most definitely care: Booth, Angela, Zack, Cam, Russ. Her breath grows a bit steadier. She can think now, clearly, think. How to get out, what to do, how to fight this damn bastard who thinks he has the right. Her eyes fall on her phone. No batteries but…the car. For a moment, Brennan remembers Tim, the boyfriend she had at age seventeen for a few months, also a foster kid and constantly trying to impress with his street smarts, his graffiti, the fact that he could hotwire a car. The phone, her car…her mind makes the connection; a small smile forms on her lips.

Hodgins wakes up some time after that, helps. They find a way to examine the dirt, a way to send the text message off. Oh, the miracles that become possible when you place two people with six PhDs between them in a desperate situation with but a few everyday objects. Again she almost smiles at the thought, proud of their ingenuity. Then they wait, all too aware of the thinning of the air, of the slow crawl towards death by asphyxiation. She can see the terror in Hodgins' eyes, and realizes suddenly that yes, she is afraid, terrified, but not like that, like him. The situation is terrible yes, but also familiar. I have been trapped in smaller spaces for longer and survived it, she thinks. I have come closer to suffocation than even this. She doesn't say it aloud, however. It is too personal, not relevant enough, not helpful. She tries to focus on Hodgins, on a solution to the air problem, on something she can _do_, something that will prove she isn't helpless.

Eventually Brennan remembers the spare tire she keeps in her trunk, accessible through the back seat, and they both smile stupidly when they manage to reach it. They each take deep gulps of the newly recovered air, neither noticing the rubbery taste of it. They talk a bit then - Hodgins, still afraid, convinced that they are dying, she insisting that it isn't faith to KNOW, to KNOW that Booth will find them in time. She remembers being, vividly now, being locked in that stupid trunk as a kid, dying, knowing that her family wasn't looking for her, wasn't coming back, wasn't going to save her. She remembers the bitterness that came with that certainty. Now she is just as certain that Booth will find them, that he won't give up. She knows that it is more than faith because faith is an abstract, emotional thing, the kind of thing Brennan hates, but this, this is fact, logical, a certainty because it is Booth and he will _be here._

Hodgins makes them a bit more air with the lithium from his camera battery and his genius, and then there is nothing left but their last, most desperate gamble for freedom. In any other situation Brennan would not even suggest such a thing, insisting that it is ridiculously uncertain, that neither of them have the right qualifications to attempt it, that they lackthe knowledge of explosives, the expertise. But now she is sure that it is this or sit back and die, and she refuses to simply give up, to give the Gravedigger what he wants, to be another powerless victim. She will fight, goddamnit, has to; they will blast their way out or, as she tells Hodgins a bit sardonically, turn their brains to jelly trying but they will not just _give up._

So they huddle in the backseat, hug, and in that last moment she is grateful, so grateful though it is selfish that this time she is not alone, that if the plan fails at least she has this last human gesture, the company. She feels a surge affection for Hodgins, such a good man even if he always irrationally paranoid. Sucking in one last desperate gulp of air, they light the fuse, and they hope.

There is a light, a roar, pain. There is darkness, shattering, motion. Disorientation. She isn't sure where she is, if she is still alive - except that she is still breathing, or trying to, but she can't. Her mouth and nose are buried in dirt and half-conscious, she knows she should be digging, tries but her limbs are so weak and she isn't even sure which way is up. Her thoughts jumble, scatter. Again she is cloaked with the thought, the knowledge that it wasn't going to work, that they, or at least she, wasn't going to survive this, because she was trying but she couldn't move, couldn't breath. She feels a dull resignation, disappointment that this, this of all stupid things, was going to be the end of everything.

Then she feels a movement above her, a strong arm clutching onto hers, pulling, and she knows, knows without a doubt who it is. Booth. Booth, there as she knew he would be, there because he is Booth, her partner, Booth. Hodgins, she tries to tell him, help Hodgins.

A few moments later, when they are both dug out and she can breath again and her eyes try to adjust to the beautiful bright glare of the sun they stare at each other, her and Booth, and they laugh and laugh in relief.

Temperance talks the medics into letting her go once it is obvious she has sustained no major injuries. She asks Booth again to let her go with him to church and, much to her surprise, he agrees. And it is beautiful there, she acknowledges, admiring the architecture, the way the light hits the stained glass windows, such a beautiful sight after so many hours spent in that dirt-covered car. But that is all that it is. There is no one there, she knows, no God and none of the Saints that her partners insists exist. Only her and Booth, and she smiles again, because that is enough.

Later, of course, when he drops her off at her home, he asks her for the third or fourth time if she is ok with being alone. Brennan can see that he doesn't really believe her when she insists that yes, she will be fine, yes. He thinks she is being stubborn, as always. How can she explain that it is so much more and less than that? That yes, it was horrible down there, and no doubt she will dream of it and wake up sweating, shivering, ready to scream but that unlike Hodgins she is not terrified of sleep. How can she explain that it could have been so much worse, after all, and that it wasn't the first or even second time she was found herself trapped, buried in what she was convinced would be her grave, dying and resigning herself to the death? That it was a relief this time, a comfort to be able to think of him, of her team and her friends.

She cannot: it is the kind of reassurance that is the opposite of reassuring. It is the kind of thing you cannot say without explanation, and an explanation on the subject is the last thing Temperance Brennan wants to give. There are some things too difficult to speak of, things too difficult to tell even to the people you trust most in the world, and just the way it would take Booth over three years to tell her the simple fact that his father drank, she shies away from this.

Sometimes it is better just to smile, to accept and return a hug from your partner and friend, and to close your eyes, safe in your own bed, basking in the luxury of the light, of life, of breath.


End file.
